Featured Image: East Of Battle Mountain

Off Interstate 80, East of Battle Mountain, Nevada

Following the snowplow, Interstate 80, East of Winnemucca, Nevada

I left Winnemucca, Nevada, heading for Utah on Interstate 80 early that morning. It was snowing heavily, and I drove very slowly behind a snowplow along the freeway. There was almost no other traffic going in either direction. I wasn’t too worried about the snow on the road — I have a Subaru and it keeps to the road pretty well — but the visibility was terrible. By Battle Mountain, although it was still snowing, I could at least see maybe a mile in front of me, and the landscape around me was starting to emerge.

That landscape was beautifully bleak and stark, almost monochromatic, and alternately flat and jagged. The mist and low cloud accentuated the effect, and I stopped off the freeway several times to get photos of it all. I think this is the best of the lot — it certainly evokes that morning for me — but there are a bunch more that will probably appear here eventually, usually emphasising the contrasts between the flatness and straight lines (like the railways, roads, and power lines, but also the horizon at times) and the sharper, more convoluted and broken lines and surfaces of almost everything else at every scale.

I wish I could say exactly where this was taken, but I can’t — the little GPS attachment for my camera didn’t fire for this shot. I think that’s a view of Argenta Rim in the background, but I really don’t know. Maybe the next time I’m passing through I’ll look it up.